Many Runescapers disagree and view the $5/month subscription is superior, seeing as how they have the 2nd highest amount of subscriptions with a crap mmo.

Jeez.

You would think at $15 a month you would get new content for free. I find all of this expansion non-sense to be a little greedy. I know it's an MMO norm. But the whole point of a constant fee it that you get new content and new experience. Why should I have to pay an extra $20 just to get a few more levels and extra areas?

I use to play asheron's call. They use to roll out updates on a monthly basis. Eventually they rolled out a paid expansion pack or 2, but they still kept releasing free content monthly.

yea WoW gets yearly update targets while SC2 takes 10+ years to get 1 part out -_-

They better start combining the expansions or something because no one is going to buy all five exansions at $20 in the foreseeable future.

I don't know if many of the naysayers actually play WoW, but there are frequently big content patches every few months. Those are free, and different from expansions. Expansions so far usually add a race or a class to the game, in addition to a full continent and 10 more levels. That's well worth the money.

lol, Listen to what you're saying.

When will the graphics get updated? Even the low-end PCs keep getting more performance. Will expanstions raise the bottom or raise the top? This needs to be done at SOME point.
I personally got turned off by the 10 year old "Ultima-9" visuals. - Even for a game that released 4 years ago. (I fully understand this is a MMORPG with huge maps, this needs to run on the largest number of PCs possible, etc) I'll wake up when WoW visuals are near "Oblivion" levels.

Keep um coming! I would say it would be nice if they lowered it to like 10, and gradually lowered it to 5. That would be sweet, and it would take a load off especially during these economic bad times. Graphics wise, i would also say the game does need a upgrade, but saying that, i don't want the game to not be playable. you got remember not everyone upgrades every two years, some ppl keep the same machine for 5 or more years, this goes back to how the economy is going. If they gradually kind of made some improvements that would be nice as well. I still love the game even though it does get boring and repetitive its a game with a world that is very alive and very fun especially raiding cities with friends, and just questing it up around azeroth.

The graphics were updated with this expansion. I doubt WoW would hit Oblivion level, the game needs to work on both new and old hardware for everyone.

Lord of the Rings Online is a good deal. My wife and I started at $15 a month, but quickly went to $199 lifetime for their one year anniversary. Now, the graphics are improved with Mines of Moria. I admit, the minimum graphics of a Radeon 8500 seems a bit low (my wife played it for a couple of weeks on 690G integrated graphics), but when a newer card is added, they improve.

What I like about MMORPG's is that they roll out new content for free, plus major class and regions with expansions. I didn't think I'd like playing online, but it's kind of romantic when you play with your spouse, plus helping out players you'd never get to meet in real life can be fun too. Sure, there are griefers, and gold spammers, but the games are getting better at policing and allowing a good experience for everyone.

The only thing I envy WoW players is the new expansion has destructable buildings. Rag doll FPS hysics didn't work for me in Oblivion (ever try to set a table in your house?), but more interactive environments are something I hope to see in the future in LOTRO.

There's content being added all the time. Karazhan and Quel'danas were added in updates, and I'm sure quite a lot of the other content was too.



Graphics were updated with the 3.0.2 patch a month ago. It's still directx version ancient, but the visibility range has increased a lot, and more differenciated spell/event effects have been added. It's still got crappy texture sizes and a crappy graphics engine, but the visual appearence of the game has increased considerably since the patch.


@ thread: As for the fee, I'm playing the game, and I actually think it's rather steep. I didn't buy the last expansion, cause I already pay so much for so little. Sure the game has a lot of content - but much of it is recycled content. You do the same kinds of quests and events over and over again. And after a month of playing you're level 70 and have little to nothing at all to do. Well now it's 80 so that adds another week, but still. You pay 15 bucks a month for doing the exact same thing you did last month. The mobs have just changed colors and drop new items that happen to be the same thing they did before, but with two stats altered.
If there's a feature they should add, it isn't content, but an ability to freeze the "playtime left" when you tire of the shit.
Since they've got no intention of adding such feature (I asked billing services, who replied a few weeks later), I've decided to hunt for someone to buy my danish account ... cause I can't pause game time, and I can't get a refund (of remaining 3 months playtime) for deleting it.


Bottom line - even though I have a house on my own and serveral cars and shit, I still find the 15 bucks a month a high price. And it obviously has nothing to do with wether or not I can afford to pay it.

I use to play WOW, but found a lot of the players so finatical about the game, it turned into a big turnoff. WOW has the most intolerent players of any mmo and NOT worth $15.00 a month to hear the same crap over and over again. Bunch of pixel nerds that would rather sit in front of their computers for 8 hours than go outside and be with real people, doing real things. The whole scene is a turn off.

Lol, as soon as Blizzard realized people like Nymh were still playing... they could make as many expansion packs as they like cause theres too many players LIKE nymh to not buy their expansion pack

What people don't understand is that these expansions nearly double the size of the game when introduced. They aren't little tidbits of the game. Thats what content patches are for. These new expansions have thousands of quests, items, and monsters added, creating another potential 100+ hours of gameplay. Blizzard would be stupid to give this for free.

I think $15/mo is the bargain of the century. You can play as often or as little as you want for the price of a single movie and a soda.

I play EQ2, which offers much better variety and content than WOW, but the concept is the same. I spend more money per month on soda, so why would I worry about the price of the MMORPG?

What I want to know is what the hell Blizzard does with all of that cash! They have > $150M coming in each month, you'd think that they would have improved the graphics engine so that it would scale with the computer system.

EQ2 runs beautifully on a $40 video card and if you turn on all of the environment features it can bring an SLI rig to its knees. A future proof graphics engine that runs on your mom's computer. What could be better? Haha

they want to make sure the player with low end gfx card still able to play the game. want it more?? max the view distance, it look alot different when u do that. however, my old computer handle it so i stop in midway.

i play wow when it first come out and stop 3 month after. i can tell you there big different in gix compare when it first come out and the gfx of wotlk. people complain becuz they just used to looking at the same screen and hard for em to tell any improvement

That kind of odd as there are over a thousand private servers. Retail see a short term pop from those leaving private servers for the new content. Many of the players private servers have left the retail servers. Many private servers have upwards of a thousand players. One has even broke away from the average and has more retail like numbers. Wowscape averages about 5 thousand players each on its 3 servers.

You have 3 competing server emulations filling the gaps monthly price has caused. Mangos, Summit(wowscape), and Arcemu are the 3 server emulations and there are so many database development teams for these 3 that I cant keep track. The servers using these emulations are seeing million of dollars in donations from there players. Players donate for levels, rare items, and vip access among others.

$15 a month for the same crap over and over

Its too much, of course they're not going to lower the price until people stop handing them the money

Blizzard is making more than enough money, to crank out much better better monthly patches

Hire some more employees and crank out Diablo 3 and SC2, but those game wont make the money that WoW does so they dont feel its a big thing

I liked blizzard before WoW when they actually gave 2 shits

look how arrogant CEO Mike Morhaime is, he stated "With World of Warcraft surpassing 11 million players, will Blizzard lower to the monthly subscription fee of $14.99? Not a chance, says Morhaime. He contends that players are pretty happy with the current rate and said there really isn’t a better value that you can get in entertainment."

I played and wasnt happy with it, I gave up WoW and found a life

WoW is geared for players that spend hours and hours playing it

it was turning into a second JOB for me, after the last expansion it turned south for me and i quickly became bored with it

GRAPHICS SUCK, I mean come on already I can still play it on my 1999 IBM A31 laptop albeit with the settings all the way down, but after 400+ hrs played do i need the settings cranked up like on my main computer, nope

Altho WoW's cartoonish graphics make it still visually better than the I want to look too realistic that i make PCs look unrealistic

The environment in WoW looks stunning still, and Im still tempted to get the expansion, altho now I have a new GF and kids so its not going to happen and while I want to see it, I enjoy the end game raids too much, and thats a major time commentment

so until i can raid without having to do the guild fights to do it, im patiently waiting for d3 and sc2 and the KOTOR MMO

Sure the graphics will get updated sometime. But old hardware will NEVER play at Oblivion levels?? That's a depressing thought.

I like how towards the end they pretty much such say, hey, instead of getting out of the basement and do something ridiculous and expensive such as *gasp* see a movie, or mini-golf, etc, go give us $15 and stay locked away from the outside.

Where your point fails is, that while there's plenty of 'potential hours of gameplay' it's just a 'reply' of what was before. There was absolutely nothing new in wotlk. Seriously. Sure there's a whole new continent. But all the quests are the same types as the old ones, even the gems have just 'doubled stats' and there's nothing really new except a 3 seater mount nobody can afford anyway. So essentially what people pay 15 bucks a month for, is watching the same movie over and over again. Innovastion isn't needed to generate revenue, therefor it isn't present.

In essence I agree with nightblade, except I still respect blizzard. They're the only developer that still does support work. Granted the ingame support is somewhat limited, but they're trying. Just like they tried with the gm's on battle.net in the past.

Sounds like the ceo is a bit cheeky!
But who can blame him, it's not like other companies don't put a premium on their products too ($200 sunglasses etc...)

The graphics are looking a bit dated now. In saying that I feel that the design work on WoW is top of the heap when it comes to MMO's.

I give +1 because of your explanations of patches and the graphic update but I have to disagree about paying to do the same over and over again. True, you still have to do quest to gain level to use better weapons to do raids to get better yet weapons and so on. But it's a game, and the point of the game is to do all that stuff. Why throw pucks at a net all the time? Why race around on the same tracks? Why shoot the same monsters in the head over and over again? Each game is repetitive in it's own ways. Now to say that paying 15$ a month do the same thing... it's up to you. I enjoy the game and I enjoy the value. When I think of that 15$ I just think "well, that's 2 beers I won't drink in a bar this month."

My point is that the new content essentially is the same as the old content. Sure you have a new goal to reach (if you want). But that's not much different from when diablo 2 ladders reset, and people raced to level 99 again. It was the same game, just reset.

When you talk to endgame raiders, they describe the expansion as a 'gear reset' as much as an expansion. Cause technically it isn't much other than that. Imo an expansion is something different from 'more of the same'. I don't really consider fear extraction point an expansion, but simply an extended ending - cause it didn't deliver any new info or story, simply a bit more running and shooting. On the other hand starcraft brood war was an expansion - cause it added so much new and improved, that it wasn't the old game anymore.
Dunno if you get what I mean ?

I think we share the same point of view but we just don't agree about how much content is enough to call it an expansion. WoW is an immense universe which already has a lot of content (races, classes, dungeons, items, quests, NPCs, etc). By comparision, it's easy to say that an expansion doesn't add enough content. "Only" one new class may seem a bit slim when you know there's already 9 classes. We "only" get 9 new regions compared to the 30+ we already have. "Only" 10 new dungeons... It depends on how much content is enough. The line between a patch and an expansion is slim. I consider WotLK a full expansion because it offers a new theme. It's not just about new stuff, it's about a new "feeling" to the game. I agree on one thing though, may it be expansion or patch, it should come for free since we already pay for the game. It's just a way for Blizzard to take a few more bucks from us. Still, since they give me hours of entertainement every month, I don't mind much.